Eredien's Journal

Why I never returned your email:
If you have tried to contact me via email in the last month or so, I did not get your email, as I am locked out of all my gmail accounts due to a long and complicated story involving unrecoverable files on a laptop, a backup which failed, a phone which lost the program I needed to recover my files, and the fact that the gmail guardians of last resort will never be convinced that I am really the owner of any of my email addresses, since I cannot remember facts like the specific date on which I first activated my gmail account lo these many years ago. I am currently in the process of trying to figure out what to do next in terms of email communications, and in terms of my Google Plus identity.

TL;DR: I do not recommend implementing google 2-step authentication.

How to contact me now:
Texting me on my cellphone is best. Calling is ok too. When I get an email again I will post it here.

Where are you living now?:
I have settled into the new house. It is good. There are trees, and a small river nearby, and also the city is nearby. I have gotten used to Boston again. I am kind of starting to enjoy living here again.

What are your roommates like?:
Roommate E. went goth clubbing with me and some friends this Monday. It was exhausting but really fun. She is awesome. Roommate J. is almost never here, and he is sometimes very confusing in how he relates to people, although he is also nice. We are looking for a roommate to replace J.

What is your job like?:
My contract with Nokia was not renewed--I made a decision to pursue a career I liked better instead. As far as that goes I was very happy indeed though....recently though through nothing that could have been predicted my job description and responsibilities were changed at a very rapid pace, twice in two weeks, and that has recently thrown me off balance. I hope to work there for some time to come, as long as I continue to really enjoy the job and manage it well, and continue to learn my own strengths/weaknesses as an employee.

Are you staying in Boston for the forseeable future?:
Probably, unless I apply elsewhere for grad school and get a scholarship. I have found there is a food sciences program at Harvard Extension school and am considering figuring out if the program there seems as good a fit for me as the one at IU did. I am still really interested in getting my masters' degree, but need to make sure I pick the right program and right choice and have the resources at hand to back me up.

What is happening with your family?:
My sister is still awesome, as is my brother-in-law.

I attempted to reconcile with my family, with the help and assistance of my therapist, in late June. It did not go well. My father absented himself for half the session, and my mother told me that she was offended on behalf of the truly abused when I claimed I was abused. Some things that they told me make more sense now--I understand now why my mother hurts when I pull back from physical contact with her. But I also understand why I pull back from physical contact. I wish I had understood both of those things sooner. But I am glad I understand them now.

It took me a while to figure out what to do with my family relations after that. I visited my hometown in August, and had a good time with the rest of my extended family, and mourned a cousin who died, and finally came to realize and articulate to myself about a half-month ago that the best course for me would be to let my parents go, finally, because of the fact that they use friends, family, and loved ones to critique and hurt me. They also used me to hurt my friends, family and loved ones by constantly querying my timelines, decisions, choices, efforts and timetables until I started distrusting my own daily choices and hard-won self-knowledge and confidence in my own joy and the joy I found in my loved ones, family, and friends. I became so distrustful of most of my own desires that I questioned away my joyful, confident, knowledgeable, brave, self-assured, and kind self every time I was asked to make a decision. Because I was going through the insidious self-undermining cycle of mental self-flagellation caused by my abusive relationship with my parents--at a time when my partner and I already needed me to stronger, kinder, more effective, and clearly decisive on a daily basis--eventually every single daily decision I made on my own or was asked to make on behalf of the relationship became a process of desperately struggling to trust and express my own needs and wants, or rejecting my own needs and wants and expressing them as selfish, foolish, petty, or undeserving of being met.

I couldn't see the self-abuse, and didn't really know what was happening at the time, other than to know that I knew profound joy and love and respect when I allowed myself to follow my own heart's deepest promptings, and profoundly hurt when I did not allow myself to follow them. I decided to follow my own heart's deepest and most joyful promptings even though I was scared to let myself trust myself. Then, I was so proud to find that trusting and expressing my own joys again made myself and others happy. Then, I was profoundly terrified to learn that my decision to trust myself had not made my partner feel as happy as she said she was, but had made her feel scared and manipulated instead. In learning that, I felt had finally done what I had been taught that trusting my own decisions would inevitably do--cause a lot of hurt. I was taught that expressing my own needs was selfish. I was taught that trusting myself to love people and be loved was foolish because the people who loved me would always eventually admit that though they loved and cared for me, they ultimately felt trapped and constrained by my love and joy and presence in their lives but had felt obligated to lie to me about it because they couldn't bear to see me hurt when they told me the truth--that I was being selfish when I dared to express my love for them.

I stopped making decisions for a long while after that, and just accepted the decisions of others--whatever would make them happiest or most convenient, I did. I was hurt. That's what I do when I'm hurt.

Later, I realized that the above was the opposite of what actually happened. I realized that I could trust myself and my own decisions, I realized the interpretation of what would happen if I trusted myself was colored and twisted by my abuse and my hurt. I feel really proud and happy I realized that.

In the time between trusting my first decision, and knowing with the sick logic of the abused that I had hurt people by trusting myself and daring to have the audacity to love someone and be loved back, and realizing that that incorrect interpretation of events was formed by the patterns of self-doubt and questioning-abuse that bringing my joyful relationship to my parents had re-started in my own head, there were a few months where I felt a great self-loathing for my own capacity for love and joy.
There were a few months where I really believed that by allowing myself to trust myself, by being proud of my ability to do so, and by being proud of my ability to love others and be loved, I had been utterly selfish, and bore direct responsibility for the breakup. I felt that if I hadn't ever given in to allowing myself to selfishly love and trust her and trust myself to be with her, she would never have felt constrained by my love, never felt she had to lie to me about her perspective on my choices, never had to feel as if she had to tell me she was happy with me when she wasn't, and never needed me to leave. I hurt a lot.

I said a lot of things about myself that weren't kind that I regret. I said a lot of things about others that weren't kind that I regret. I don't think I could have gotten here today without having gone through that period of hating myself for being able to trust in my choices, hating that I could trust that my partners were telling me the truth, and hating myself for loving myself enough to allow myself to express my needs, which finally showed itself up as the foolishness it was all along.

It is good to trust myself. It is good to express my choices. It is good to love and be loved. What wasn't good was letting my self-confidence get undermined by my parents' insidious questioning of all my choices, such that I myself began questioning those things and hurt myself and the people I loved.

I can't think of a way to have a relationship with my parents that won't ultimately end in their raising objections and tiny undermining critiquing questions about everything I do, am, want to be, or who or what I love. I can't talk with them without talking about those things. They don't have the willpower to resist getting me to question every decision I make, and I believe they don't fully understand what they are doing. I don't have the ability, even after a decade of being on my own and learning--and being taught--to love myself and others better and better, to fully evade the abuse pattern. I don't know if any amount of self-love and self-confidence would ever be enough, because the more I have of it the more they use it as a weapon to convince me I am selfish and ungrateful, and turn me against my own best self. So, I am not talking to them any more.

I should have cut off relations with them fully last summer for my own health, but I had to be sure that I was making a decision that was good for me and not just good for my relationships--if it had been good for my relationships but bad for me it would ultimately have been a bad decision for my relationships as well.

TL;DR: I am cutting off relationships with my parents: the better I get, the more they use it against me and the people I love. They use the love I have for others to critique and hurt me and get me to doubt myself, and they use the love others have for me to critique and hurt others and get them to doubt themselves through my doubt. They have even done it to themselves, with their own love. This is unacceptable. They cannot stop. The better I get, the more ammo I give them. This is unfortunate, but I am not even really sad about it anymore; it's been more than a year coming slowly to this decision, since even mid 2009 I think, at the engagement party my parents threw for us: they didn't care if I or my partner wanted it. They were throwing it for themselves in a very real sense. I started to try and convince myself that they were doing it for me and my partner because I wanted to convince myself of that so badly, and I succeeded. When they did not call her when I was sick the summer of 2010, I tried to convince myself that it was because I had never done a good job of showing my family what I loved about her, because I so badly didn't want to admit that they would never respect me and the choices I made in my life, and I succeeded. From there, a whole host of doubts flowed and paralyzed my every move. No more.

I feel a vast sense of relief and the beginnings of a new life.

How is your health?:
Generally pretty ok, though often I have to go off antidepressants as I do not have enough money to pay for my psych services out of pocket and they do not take the state healthcare plan (no health insurance at job). However, I am still getting antidepressants and going to counseling when I can afford it, and enjoy it. It has been really helpful. I got a new doctor early this spring. I have not yet visited her; when I do for my yearly October visit I plan on introducing myself and asking for new hormone level tests, as well as discussing the fact that my psych medication noticeably interacts with my PMS in somewhat confusing ways. I also plan on asking for an allergy referral and a sleep study, as I have been having problems with my sleep cycle for years now and might finally have the resources to get help for myself.

I am tentatively trying out going vegetarian for health reasons, as I suspect I might have the beginnings of a latex-fruit reactivity problem. I am also putting it off for health reasons, as I know I have a lactose intolerance that makes me ill and uncomfortable for days at a time. I am also putting it off for ethical reasons, as I am really uncomfortable eating the commercially-produced milk, cheese and eggs that appear in so many processed food products now.

What have you been doing?:
Reading, writing, and healing. The fey novel is going to be about abuse, recovery, and its complexities: I cried when I realized that. I have also been hiking and swimming a lot. There is a lake about a mile from my house in one direction. There is a bookstore about a mile in the other direction. Life is, generally, good.

How are your pets?:
Tokai is finally eating on her own again. I am thrilled. She is a mighty huntress! Oolong is herself. She is adorable and fluffy and somewhat dopey. She's also 3 next month.